Dressage. The one bit of the event most of us wish we didn’t have to do. Nicknamed ‘stressage’ in the lorry park. How many times has the conversation round the scoreboard or on the trip home started ‘well, I would have been placed if only my dressage had been better….’?
These are my five top tips to help you gain marks, so that maybe soon that conversation is ‘yes, I nailed a sub-30 score’!
1. Write for a dressage judge.
I include this because I think it is the single most valuable thing you can do to get your eye in at the start of the season. I always try and volunteer to write at at least one event at the start of the year because sitting with a judge, learning what gets a 6, and what turns that into a 7 or an 8 is insider information you can turn to your advantage. I will never forget writing for Jennie Loriston-Clarke and discovering that anything behind the vertical doesn’t get more than a 6, no matter how flash the trot, or that she hates taking marks away and always looks for where she can give you marks – which made me feel much more comfortable about the process of being judged! Plus, you get to feel warm and fuzzy because you volunteered to help the sport you love. Win-Win.
2. Practice the first 3 or 4 movements of the test.
This is my new-found ammunition against judges which I learnt at the International Eventing Forum. If you run through the first 3 or 4 movements of the test, it makes you and the horse super-confident, and you can ride down that centre line knowing you are wowing the judge. Much like when you hit the first 3 or 4 fences of a showjumping round on that perfect stride out of that perfect canter and your confidence grows accordingly, leading to a great feeling round, by running through those first few movements of the test you can replicate that feeling in the dressage. Try it!
3. Learn your warmup.
Horses like routine – they feel safe when they know what is coming next. So work with your trainer to figure out the warmup which works for your horse. Then, if you’re running behind schedule, you can still do your warmup, just less of it (even if that means the dash from the lorry park to the arena includes a hasty leg yield and shoulder in!). Conversely, if things are running behind schedule in your arena, you can walk on a loose rein knowing that when you have X minutes to go, you can pick up your warmup routine. Humans like routine too – and in the stress of a competition environment, never underestimate the edge you’ll gain by having a plan.
4. Know your test.
Knowing your test is not the same as learning your test. Anyone can learn a test – it’s a series of commands after all, hardly rocket science. The real trick to polish your test-riding, is to know your test. Know it so well that it is second nature to perform the next movement, automatic to turn across the diagonal, or walk for 3 steps, or halt and rein back. Once you have the test so ingrained that you can ride it on autopilot, then you can start thinking about other things. And when you can concentrate on how your horse is going rather than where you are going next, then you start noticing him dropping behind the leg, or getting tense, or stiffening in the contact, and crucially you can do something about it before the judge notices all those things too.
5. Smile!
All I want to say about this is that the majority of us are not sponsored heros. We don’t event to pay the mortgage (on the house or the lorry!), or to keep the lights on, we event because we enjoy it. So live a little, show the judge that you’re pleased to be there, that you appreciate how lucky you are to be able to take part in this amazing sport. After all, you don’t make the judge think positively about you when you look like you’d rather be somewhere, anywhere, else! You might just find it takes some of the tension out of your body too – which would be a nice bonus.
